An Extended Function-Behaviour-Structure Ontology to support FMEA within a System Engineering Context
Haytham Younus, Aleksandr Doikin, Felician Campean, Sohag Kabir, Amr Abdullatif, David Delaux, Pascal Bonnaud
Abstract
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis is a core tool for the systems engineering design assurance, facilitating the identification of design risks and their management throughout the lifecycle of the system. However, the development and management of the FMEA within a systems engineering context faces many challenges, including effectiveness of the process and integrity of knowledge capture, and the lack of a consistent integration with the systems lifecycle. The research underpinning this contribution aims to establish an intelligent FMEA environment supported by an ontology as the basis for knowledge representation of complex systems function failure underpinning the FMEA analysis and documentation. We propose to extend the Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontology of system design, with representation of function failure reasoning supported by a function failure taxonomy. This provides a consistent ontological basis underpinning the FMEA analysis of a system. We also discuss the expansion of the ontology with the levels of design decomposition of a complex system, to support the management of traceability of the FMEA across the design process. We illustrate the deployment of the proposed ontology framework, implemented in Protégé environment.